


An Unusual Friendship

by NightsMistress



Category: Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Genre: Gen, obligatory NME warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-24
Updated: 2013-12-24
Packaged: 2018-01-05 21:44:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1098925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NightsMistress/pseuds/NightsMistress
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ronan doesn't really know much about Darryl, but he thinks he's pretty cool anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Unusual Friendship

**Author's Note:**

  * For [strix_alba](https://archiveofourown.org/users/strix_alba/gifts).



> When I saw your story hit the pinch hit list, it crystallized an urge that I had had since the prompt list got revealed. I hope you like it.

The Irish tradition of wizardry was such that when something drastic happened to one of them, eventually they’d receive an invitation to come and have a cup of tea. As such, when Ronan received a message asking him to visit sometime over the weekend, he wasn’t surprised. He’d been expecting one of the Seniors to contact him, and so when Doris Smythe’s message came through, all he felt was relief that it wasn’t Johnny.

Once, he could have simply teleported over, ignored the overlays and challenged the world to comment on it. Of course, this was before he threw a flaming stick into his chest in the hope to buy back a few precious minutes and be the gate through which a miracle could come into the world. Now, he had to take the bus like everyone else. He didn’t mind though.

“Truthfully,” he said to Mrs Smythe over the obligatory cup of tea. “I feel more like the ground someone trampled on. I’m not expected to die again in a month’s time, am I?” 

“There’s no need to be morbid,” she said. 

Ronan rolled his eyes. “How can I not be? I should be _dead_. I intended it, and I went through with it and — what am I meant to do now?”

“There’s a whole list of projects you could sign up for,” she said mildly, though Ronan could see the faint smile that she was almost hiding. “Have you looked into any of those?”

He had, as it turned out. There were a couple of projects that had even looked interesting; the one about storm manipulation seemed obvious given his interests, and the one adapting alien technologies to be used on Earth could be interesting as well. But what had captured his attention was the restoration project on Mars. He didn’t know why it captured his attention, but judging by the waiting list, it had captured the attention of a lot of wizards, most with far more experience than him.

“Yeah, the Mars one, then the storm one. Why not?” He laughed then. “The waiting list is in the vicinity of _months_ though, so I’m not holding my breath.”

Mrs Smythe smiled, openly this time. “I’m sure something will come through for you.”

Once Ronan arrived back at his house, he flopped on his bed and then blinked at the change in his status. Somehow, he had jumped several months of queue to be placed on the Mars team along with Kit and Darryl.

“Huh,” he said softly. “How about that.”

 _Kit,_ he sent. _I hope your team has room for one more._

The reply was quickly forthcoming: _Who’d you have to bribe to get on?_

 _No bribes,_ Ronan sent back, grinning. _Seems like I’m owed a favor. What time should I get there?_

9:00am tomorrow, my time.

“Oh God,” Ronan said aloud. “You have _got_ to be kidding me. On a _Saturday_?”

*

His first day on Mars started rather inauspiciously, with Ronan having slept in most of the day after a big night out the previous night and then missing the DART into Dublin. He was still fixing his hair when he hit the worldgate, closing his eyes against the vertigo that it always triggered with him.

He opened his eyes at the end of the transit to see rust-brown dirt as far as the eye could see, plus Kit and Darryl. Kit had apparently started yet another one of his growth spurts, and he was taller than Ronan remembered him being. Lankier, in any event. Darryl’s face lit up with a smile when he saw Ronan, waving enthusiastically. Ronan had never understood how that expression made sense until he saw Darryl smile. It was the kind of smile that invited one to smile back. 

He resisted the urge. Barely.

“Hey, Ronan said, waving sardonically as he made his way over.. “Sorry I’m late. Missed my bus.”

“You catch a bus to the Moon?” Darryl asked, frowning slightly. He wasn’t quite looking at Ronan, but it didn’t seem to be because he was afraid of him. Instead, it just seemed to be a personal quirk of his, and Ronan shrugged it off.

“Not quite,” he said. “Bus to the worldgate, and then gate up here.”

“No way,” Kit said. “You seriously can’t be doing that every time you want to come up here. Darryl, would your colocation trick work?”

“It should,” Darryl said carefully, as though he didn’t trust the words to come out as he wanted. “Let me try. What’s your location?”

After a moment’s thought, Ronan rattled off the coordinates for his bedroom. Darryl closed his eyes and opened then, smiling widely. “Man, your room is a _mess_.”

“You cannot be telling me you’re in my bedroom,” Ronan said. “What’s the poster on the door?”

“There isn’t one,” Darryl said immediately. Ronan frowned, as he was entirely correct.

“How are you doing that?”

“I can be in different places at the same time,” Darryl said. “I’m in four places right now.”

“Four,” Ronan said slowly. “That’s some talent.”

“Yeah, it’s something Carl’s looking at,” Kit said, shooting Ronan a look and a quick telepathic message of _watch what you say_.

Ronan bit back the urge to point out that he knew as much as Kit did about abdals, if not more, thanks to the One’s Champion. It would be rude, and besides, he couldn’t be certain that Darryl couldn’t overhear it. Abdals were tricky things, or so he had been told. Their power existed in their simply being, as opposed to doing. It was intrinsic to them, as opposed to their actions, and they were valued for what they were as opposed to what they did.

Ronan hated that he understood why that was the way it had to be.

“All right, you’ve proved your point,” he said instead. “Get out of my room before you scare my mam to death.”

“Fine,” Darryl said, and blinked. Ronan quelled the urge to smash his way through the overlays to check to make sure that Darryl wasn’t hiding in his wardrobe or something similar.

“So, today we’re just going to do a quick survey,” Kit said. “Get Ronan used to Mars.”

“Used to Mars,” Ronan said flatly. “What, is there something more than just dirt here?”

“Oh, now you’ve done it,” Darryl muttered.

‘It’, as it turned out, was Kit regaling Ronan, at length, about everything that Mars had to offer. From topography to history to mythology, it seemed that Kit had not only read about it, but had opinions on how fantastic it all was and how, at the end of this, Ronan would find it all as interesting as Kit did.

“Oh Lord,” Ronan said fervently at the end of it. “You’re an areophile.”

Kit scowled indignantly. Darryl snickered.

“He wants to be,” Darryl said. Kit scowled. Ronan held his hand up for a high five. After a brief moment, Darryl slapped his hand against Ronan’s.

“Don’t think that because you got me once that you’ll score all the time,” Kit said.

Darryl and Ronan exchanged grins.

“Nah,” Darryl said. “Just most of the time.”

“We wouldn’t want it to be boring,” Ronan added.

“I have created a monster,” Kit announced gloomily.

“Maybe,” Ronan said. “But show me your new planetary girlfriend, won’t you?”

*

Fortunately for Ronan’s sanity, not every trip to Mars involved Kit announcing all the wonderful things that Mars had to offer its Earthly visitors. Some of this had to do with the surveying that they were doing being more complicated than they had anticipated, meaning that Kit didn’t have enough breath to spare to talk about the neat things that Mars was doing.

Most of it was because Ronan and Darryl were working on their own. Darryl’s colocation trick meant that Ronan could come up to Mars whenever Darryl was up there, and Ronan was keen for Darryl to not be up on Mars on his own. As it turned out, they worked well together; Darryl had an unusual perspective on wizardry, and Ronan had been working with a being older than the universe long enough to have some unique insights of his own. 

It was interesting, because Darryl didn’t say much. Ronan at first thought that he didn’t like it when people were talking, but the silences stretched out so uncomfortably that Ronan ended up filling it with words just so that they weren’t empty. The tense, unhappy line of Darryl’s shoulders eased when Ronan talked about things that didn’t require Darryl to talk too much, so Ronan told Darryl about the things he did when he wasn’t on Mars.

That said, there was something that bothered him about what Darryl had said to him before. Ronan knew Darryl well enough now to know that he didn’t lie, or even dissemble like most wizards Ronan knew, but instead told the complete, unvarnished truth. 

“Darryl,” Ronan said. “This is going to be rude. But you said earlier that you had four versions of you around.”

“Yeah, I remember that,” Darryl said, guileless as always. “What about it?”

“But I only count three: Mars, your house, my house. Where’s the fourth?”

“Oh, that,” Darryl said with a laugh. “Inside me with the Lone Power. It was part of my Ordeal.”

“Uh,” Ronan said. “That seems like something we should all know about.”

“It’s fine,” Darryl said. “Having this colocation trick has been really useful for that. Have you been thinking about that all this time?”

“Kind of.” Ronan tried to stay non-committal about the idea of Earth’s abdal, who happened to be the most genuinely good person he had ever met, turning that innate fierce goodness into a cage to hold the Lone Power. He knew he couldn’t have done it. He had resented hosting a Power on their side, one who wanted nothing more than to further Life. The idea of constantly battling the Lone Power, with no hope of reprieve, inside your very self …

“You okay?” Darryl said, interrupting Ronan’s train of thought.

“Yeah,” Ronan said. “I’m fine.”

“All right,” Darryl said. “So what’s this about your Ordeal. What was it like?”

A wizard’s Ordeal was an intensely personal thing, and for a moment Ronan thought about not telling Darryl about his.

“I took in the sea,” he said, and Darryl’s face lit up.

“That’s _awesome_! Is that how you know S’reee?”

“No, that was after,” Ronan said. He added, “You know S’reee?”

“Yeah, she’s great! She’s been teaching me new tricks with wizardry.”

Ronan nodded, seeing the sense in that. For all that S’reee was young, she was very good at her job of managing wizards with unusual specialties and inclinations and they didn’t come more unusual than being an abdal.

“She taught me a few things as well,” he said finally. “Mostly water tricks. Whales are good at those, you know.”

“You want to show me some?”

Ronan turned slowly on his heel, gesturing at the wide, waterless Martian landscape and raising his eyebrows. “Right now?”

“You know I meant back home,” Darryl said, sighing in exasperation. 

“Fine,” Ronan said. “Next time we visit the Atlantic, I’ll show you some water tricks. But first we better wrap up here.”

There were, after all, surveys to be done, rocks to catalogue and messages to be sent to Mamvish.

*

_Wake up,_ was the first thing Ronan heard the next day. _We’re going to the ocean._

“No,” Ronan said, rolling out of bed and hitting the clothes he had strewn on the floor. If only he had known that they would be useful like this.

 _Oh good, you’re awake now,_ Darryl said. _Get dressed already so that we can go._

“What? Where?”

 _To the ocean._ Darryl’s voice had taken on the particular cadence people adopt when talking to the hard of hearing, and Ronan thought that it was extremely unfair that he managed to do that while still maintaining a relatively flat affect. 

“Why?”

_Because, man, S’reee’s available now._

This got Ronan sitting up in a hurry. He hadn’t seen S’reee since the events on Yaldiv, and while he really didn’t want to talk to her about his involvement in that particular bit of errantry, he did want to see how the ocean was faring after the Pullullus. “All right, all right.”

Darryl came over just as Ronan was tying up his boots, causing Ronan to think that maybe he had been spying on him. “I’m ready when you are,” Ronan said, and regretted it when Darryl teleported them over to the Atlantic Ocean immediately.

“S’reee!” Darryl shouted in delight, bouncing over to her on the surface of the water. Ronan was highly amused to note that Darryl was increasing the surface tension of the water under his foot just enough to bounce on it. That was a neat trick if ever he had seen one. He flapped his hands up and down with what Ronan assumed to be excitement as he spoke to her. “I haven’t seen you in _ages_.”

“Hey,” Ronan said laconically, walking over the water surface. He couldn’t quite keep the smile off his face. “Long time no see.”

“Hello!” S’reee sung. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen you two. Messaging just isn’t the same, is it?”

“Nope,” Darryl said. “I know you’ve been busy with your whale thing, which is cool. We’re cool with that.”

“Her whale thing,” Ronan said, deadpan. “As opposed to her … other thing?”

“Yes, I’ve been busy,” S’reee said. “But enough of that! What have you two been doing?”

“Mars,” Ronan said. “Like the rest of the planet.”

“Just the humans,” Darryl corrected. “Way to be human-centric.”

“I’ll human-centric you, if you keep that up,” Ronan retorted.

“I’m surprised you can fit in Mars around your social life.”

“Yeah, what of it? You’ll appreciate it one day,” Ronan said. “When you’re older.”

S’reee’s hiss of laughter interrupted their stream of banter. “I knew you two should be friends.”

“Honestly, it’s just to keep my social life easy,” Ronan said, and pretended to wince when Darryl punched him on the arm. “Consolidating friendships makes getting together so much easier. _Ow._ Darryl, don’t punch people where they’re getting sunburned.” 

“Wear sunblock next time,” Darryl said, completely unsympathetic as he examined Ronan’s reddening arm. “That is going to blister so bad tomorrow if you don’t do something about it now. Especially your face.”

Ronan heaved a sigh as he started to block the sun from his skin. “See what I put up with? He’s terrible.”

“No, I’m not. You’re terrible.”

“ _Anyway_ ,” Ronan said. “How’s everything been since the Pullullus?”

“It’s taking a while, but everything is getting back to normal,” S’reee said.

“Anything we can do to help?”

“No, but thank you for offering.”

“So what about these neat tricks?” Darryl said. “Ronan said you taught him some cool water tricks.”

S’reee whistled her amusement. Ronan took the opportunity to ask the sea how things were going. What S’reee had said was mostly accurate, though she was underselling how bad things had gone and how much work she had done to fix things already. That was S’reee though, self-effacing to a fault and entirely dependable. He was asking the sea what work was left to be done when he was jerked out of rapport with it. Startled, he blinked salt water out of his eyes to see Darryl looking at him sheepishly.

“Sorry, I thought you were just pretending,” he said.

Ronan frowned, swirling his finger before dumping the mini water spout he had created on Darryl’s head.

The resulting water fight was as brutal as it was short, with both parties ending up utterly drenched.

*

It was just after dawn and Ronan was heading toward Grand Central, his mind caught up with the wizardry he had been working with S’reee, when someone tapped his shoulder. He jumped, whirling around to see a man who looked vaguely familiar. It took him a minute to place where he had seen the man before; he hadn’t had much to do with the Seniors on this side of the pond and so didn’t recognize Tom Swale like he would a European senior.

“Ronan?” Mr Swale said. “Could I have a word?”

“Sure,” Ronan said, stepping away from the entrance to Grand Central. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Mr Swale said. “Doris and I have just been talking about your partnership with Darryl.”

“I wouldn’t say we’re partners,” Ronan said carefully. “We’re friends, and we work well together, but …” he shrugged.

“We’re impressed at how well you’ve worked with an autistic wizard,” Mr Swale said.

Ronan stared. Darryl’s lack of eye contact, the repetitive motion he did with his hands sometimes, the way he sometimes took things literally when they had never been intended that way — Ronan had chalked them up as being quirks that made up Darryl. They didn’t seem pathological at all, and now he was angry with Mr Swale for making them so and for making it seem like Ronan had ulterior motives in being his friend.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Ronan said sharply, shoving his hands into his pockets in a furious gesture. “I didn’t even _know_ he was autistic until you told me. Does it matter?”

“No,” Mr Swale said. “It doesn’t.”

Ronan thought about this for a minute, and then scowled. “That was the _point_ , wasn’t it? That I saw him as a great kid and not what I thought autistic kids were like.”

“Darryl _is_ a great kid,” Mr Swale said. “And he needs good friends.”

“I wish you hadn’t told me,” Ronan said ungraciously. “Because his autism doesn’t matter.”

“It does matter,” Mr Swale said. “It matters to _Darryl_.”

This was something that Ronan could understand. He knew he hated it when people said that nationality didn’t matter, because Ronan’s nationality mattered to him. It had shaped him in all ways, and he was Irish down to his bones. He’d be offended if someone told him that his being Irish didn’t matter to someone. He didn’t have to understand why it mattered to Darryl that he was autistic to appreciate that it did.

“All right,” Ronan said, releasing a breath slowly to not snap at Mr Swale. “Is there anything I’m meant to do with this knowledge?”

“What do you think you should do?” Mr Swale said, and Ronan barely resisted the urge to yell that if he _knew_ he wouldn’t have asked. Raging against Seniors never got you anywhere, even when they weren’t yours, because they often had other motives for what they did. He thought about what Mr Swale had said, and what he had learned about Darryl these last weeks.

“Can you excuse me?” he said, pressing one finger to his ear to block out the sounds of the terminus. “I have to make a call.” Then he engaged the messaging function on his manual.

“Hey Darryl,” he said, a smile sneaking across his face. “Are you doing anything _not_ Mars related today? Because it’s my turn to drag you out of bed.”


End file.
